Why Orwell Matters

by Christopher Hitchens

The will to command and to dominate is one thing, but the will to obey and be prostrate is a deadly foe as well. At one point in a short earlier article, Orwell asked himself if decency and powerlessness were inversely related. Nobody has ever made this point more forcibly than he does in Nineteen Eighty-Four, just as nobody since Dostoyevsky has come so close to reading the mind of the Grand Inquisitor. With a part of themselves, humans relish cruelty and war and absolute capricious authority, are bored by civilized and humane pursuits and understand only too well the latent connection between sexual repression and orgiastic vicarious collectivized release. Some regimes have been popular not in spite of their irrationality and cruelty, but because of it. There will always be Trotskys and Goldsteins and even Winston Smiths, but it must be clearly understood that the odds are overwhelmingly against them, and that as with Camus’s rebel, the crowd will yell with joy to see them dragged to the scaffold. This long and steady look into the void was Orwell’s apotheosis of ‘the power of facing’.